Longreads

Robots, rebellion, and the post-apocalyptic performance art of Survival Research Labs Previous Story When playing 'Dishonored,' listen closely

Haruki Murakami during a ceremony where he received the 2006 Franz Kafka Award in Prague. Novelists tend not to rise and fall by the normal physics of pop culture—even a successful book is a…

Steve wept. And unlike Jesus, who famously wept only once, Jobs cried all the time. He cried at the beginning of Apple after Woz's father pushed his son to…

The news, Im afraid, is dire. The Internet is about to be destroyed by big media. It is about be killed by two Congressional bills The ProtectIP and The Stop Online Piracy…

Three men doing time in Israeli prisons recently appeared before a parole board consisting of a judge, a crimi

HP Touchpad Launch Party, Best Buy Union Square, New York City, June 30, 2011 In the tablet market, theres no middle path, no way to build a business by knocking

Deindividuation is what happens when we get behind the wheel of a car and feel moved to scream abuse at the woman in front who is slow in turning right. It is what motivates a responsible father in a football crowd to yell crude sexual hatred at the opposition or the referee. And it's why under the cover of an alias or an avatar on a website or a blog – surrounded by virtual strangers – conventionally restrained individuals might be moved to suggest a comedian should suffer all manner of violent torture because they don't like his jokes, or his face. Digital media allow almost unlimited opportunity for wilful deindividuation. They almost require it.

The stick would soon hold a videogame unlike any other ever created. It would exist on the memory stick and nowhere else. According to a set of rules defined by Jason Rohrer, only one person on earth could play the game at a time. The player would modify the game’s environment as they moved through it. Then, after the player died in the game, they would pass the memory stick to the next person, who would play in the digital terrain altered by their predecessor—and on and on for years, decades, generations, epochs. In Rohrer’s mind, his game would share many qualities with religion—a holy ark, a set of commandments, a sense of secrecy and mortality and mystical anticipation. This was the idea, anyway, before things started to get weird. Before Chain World, like religion itself, mutated out of control.

Forty years later, the Stanford Prison Experiment remains among the most notable—and notorious—research projects ever carried out at the University. For six days, half the study's participants endured cruel and dehumanizing abuse at the hands of their peers. At various times, they were taunted, stripped naked, deprived of sleep and forced to use plastic buckets as toilets. Some of them rebelled violently; others became hysterical or withdrew into despair. As the situation descended into chaos, the researchers stood by and watched—until one of their colleagues finally spoke out.